I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

We leave Pippa behind, standing in the dark, teeming bowels of the camp, while the sun begins to stain the sky electric, and from all sides the guns draw closer.

And there it is: Even though we’re standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom. The way to find happiness is through the cure. Therefore, it is only through the cure that one finds freedom.

I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have." He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. "Hardly." "Born and raised. You're a transplant." I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. "Country bumpkin!" I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing. "City slicker," he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating.

His secret name, which belongs to me, and to him, and to no one else.